about what a place is for.
Brandt came in a little after two by the moon, alone, on foot, leading his
horse through the south gap where Aponi's cousins stood watch, because a
rider at a gallop in the dark gets men shot by friends. Emmett heard the soft
challenge and the softer answer and was at the gap before the horse was fully
through, and the sheriff of the county stood in the yard of the Cole ranch with
his hat in his hand and two folded papers in his coat, looking around him at
the sleeping camp with the expression of a man counting something he
already knew the sum of and did not enjoy knowing.
"Sheriff," Emmett said.
"Cole." Brandt's eyes went to the fence line, to the warriors standing in the
dark with their rifles down. "They're quiet."
"They were told to be."
"By him or by you?"
87
"By him," Emmett said. "It carried better."
Brandt nodded slowly, as if that confirmed an arrangement he had already
made in his own mind. "Then let's do this proper," he said. "Wake the chief.
And the girl, if she's the tongue. I've got two papers in this coat that are going
to have a fight at sunup, and the three of us ought to know beforehand which
one I mean to let win."
They did it in the cabin, with the door shut and one lamp trimmed low,
because paper talk carries and Brandt was not ready for the yard to hear it.
Tadan came in without escort, which Emmett understood for the statement it
was: the chief of three hundred walked into a white man's cabin alone, at
night, on the white man's word that the talk was talk. He stood until Aponi,
woken and instantly and completely awake in the way of scouts, told him in
his own language that the chair was offered without insult in it, and then he
sat, and his hands rested open on his knees, and Brandt laid the two papers
on the table side by side like a pair of dueling pistols.
"This one first," Brandt said, and unfolded the emergency order. He read it
the way he would read it at the gate, every word, no hurrying and no
softening. It recited that an encampment of hostiles threatened the water
supply of the valley, that the territorial authority for emergencies had been
invoked by a deputy's affidavit, and that the sheriff's office was directed to
clear the Cole ranch of the encampment before it could seize or foul the well,
using such force as the resistance offered should require. It was signed by a
judge two counties away who had never seen the valley. It was sealed. On its
face it was as good as law ever looks.
"The deputy's name on the affidavit," Aponi said, when Brandt had finished.
"Say it again."
88
"Cobb," Brandt said. "Deputy Lyman Cobb. Vernon Slade found him in a
Dry Fork saloon with debts older than his badge, and bought him the way
you buy a horse, except Cobb was cheaper." He folded the order along its
creases, precisely, and set it down. "Now the other one."
The second paper was Kellam's statement, and it was uglier paper, a sheet of
lined foolscap soft at the folds from Brandt's coat, covered in a clerkly hand
with the foreman's mark at the bottom witnessed and dated. Brandt read that
one too, all of it. How Burt Kellam, foreman to Vernon Slade these six years,
had on Slade's written instruction taken two men and a Bar-S wagon to the
Eagle Rock spring in the second week of the drought and fouled it with dead
stock and worse, so the spring would fail and the band that watered there
would have to move or die. How he had gone on Slade's order to the Cole
ranch trough by night with a sack of poison and been taken at the fence by
the ranch watch. How the sack was a Bar-S feed sack cut down, and the
poison bought in Slade's name at Dry Fork, and the wagon's hub-band, shed
above the spring trail and found there, was Bar-S iron marked with the
brand's stamp. It was signed with Kellam's mark, which Kellam could make
well enough for a man who wrote his name the way other men signed with
an X and meant it harder.
Brandt set the statement beside the order and put one hand flat on each, like a
man weighing them at a scale he did not trust.
"There it is," he said. "One paper says clear the camp. The other says the man
who wants it cleared poisoned water to make the clearing necessary, and his
own foreman says so under his mark, and I've got the sack corner with the
Bar-S stencil and the hub-band off his wagon to hold up next to it. Tomorrow
at sunup Slade rides up to that gate with Cobb and forty guns behind an order
that says law. And I ride out to meet them, because the order's addressed to
89
my office, and I'm the only part of my office that isn't bought."
"Then you refuse it," Aponi said.
"I don't refuse it," Brandt said. "Refusing's a thing a man does in a room. Out
there it's just me saying no to forty rifles and them saying yes. No." He
leaned forward, and the lamplight put his face into hard country. "I read it. I
read it all, out loud, at the gate, so every man jack of them hears what he's